my beloved pirates

i've pretty much given up on my beloved pittsburgh pirates.

if you follow baseball, you can pretty much stop reading right now -- you know the story. fourteen consecutive losing seasons. the rule five draft debacle. no bottled water allowed. chris shelton. bronson arroyo. jason schmidt. and there's more that i can't bring myself to remember right now.

when i was working at the wheeling news-register back in the mid '90s, the family that owns the paper -- headed by g. ogden nutting -- bought into the ownership team that was purchasing the pittsburgh pirates. the head of the team, kevin mcclatchy, was an old newspaper-empire friend of the nutting family, which i think explains why the nuttings were brought in.

at the time, i remember thinking that good things were not in the pirates' future, because i saw how the parent corporation was run. but at the time, remember, the nuttings held just a small part of the team -- mcclatchy was the face and the money running the show. but over time, the nuttings were offered more and more control, and made the appropriate investments -- by 2003, i think, the nuttings were the real force behind the team.

i won't go into the wretched history of this team since sid bream broke all our hearts ... i write this because a thread on honest wagner (one of the best pirates-focused sites on the Internet Tubes) brought me to rant ... or as much as i do rant ... about ownership of my beloved pirates.

bones, one of the proprietors of the site, asked a question: are the nuttings evil, or just greedy?

my response ...

***

hmmm.

greedy or evil ... it's a tough call. i really think it depends on your definition of "evil," and whether you think the nuttings have any evil intent with their actions.

EVIL

i know them from the journalism side of their "empire," and it definitely was demoralizing in the newsroom when we realized that making money, not reporting the news, was the primary goal for the papers.

what made it more demoralizing: none of us knew exactly how much was being made -- we all knew the fourth floor (executive suites) were rolling in it, but we had no idea how much. we also didn't know what sort of budget we had to go out and do our jobs, and we were constantly looking for ways to stretch dollars.

sounds familiar, doesn't it?

the list of things we couldn't say in the paper could fill a stylebook. ogden's other interests were so numerous, and he used his papers to slant coverage in his favor, meant that some things were verboten -- like yellow pages. or riverboat gaming -- never gambling, just gaming, as if we were softening it up a bit for the little old ladies who read the paper after going to morning mass.


and is that "evil," or is that just greedy and/or stupid?

INTENT
when i was 24, i'd have voted "evil" over and over. now that i'm older and, allegedly, wiser, i'd soften my judgment a bit -- not because of any facts at hand, but because it certainly seems to me that the nuttings really don't care enough to be evil.

making money on mediocre newspapers? to them, that's no different than making money on mediocre baseball teams ... or ski resorts ... or the utne reader ... or awkwardly named telephone directories ...

if there's a buck to be made, they'll make it. if that buck can be doubled by reducing the quality to the lowest the public will still pay for ... well, that's two bucks made, and that is the definition of a good investment.

if the nuttings seemed to give a damn about what businesses they were running, then i'd say "evil" a hundred times over.

but is apathy evil? that's a good question.